Rutherford Park (13 page)

He had been told once, by one of the housemaids who had gone there for the Season, that the women all looked like princesses: that they dressed up every day in much finer clothes than they wore here, and that there were dances every night, and that she had seen Lady Cavendish come in from a party at night and there had been fresh orchids in her hair and pinned to her dress. And that she had stood in the hallway and pulled off the orchids and thrown them to the floor as she took off her wrap.

The maid had rescued the orchids and kept them in a vase, where they had bloomed in the kitchens. And he thought of those flowers, and imagined Louisa in all sorts of gowns, and her turning to look at him, as she had often looked at him kindly when he had saddled her horse for hunting, or for going on to the parkland, and that this time she would have orchids in her hair, just like her mother, and like the orchids growing in the glasshouse. And then the idea of the glasshouse shattered the dream as Emily’s face came back to him, pale, motionless, rigid, as they put her in the shuttered motor van that had smoked and snaked its way down the drive,
taking her away to be buried. He stood up, slammed the back of the wagon shut, and took Wenceslas out of the yard into the green, deserted world of the road.

They trudged on down past the pub, its windows now closed against the afternoon and its curtains drawn. It was only when he was well past it that he heard someone calling out behind him. He stopped and looked; the publican’s daughter was coming up the road after him, holding a leather pouch.

“Is it Jack?” she asked.

“Yes.”

She held it out to him. “Will you see Mr. Gray? He left this behind him, his tobacco pouch.”

He took it. And then from the pub came the unmistakable sound of a child crying.

“Oh,” the girl said. “’Tis the bairn.”

They regarded each other. He tied the horse to a field gate and walked back, ducking into the cool interior of the pub. It was only two rooms, centuries old, low ceilinged. The girl took him to the back, where a kind of dairy house was attached. He recognized the room; there was a stone plug in the sloping floor, and the well of the floor was covered in water from an underground spring. Milk churns from the farm stood in the water, waiting to be collected and put to Richmond. In the far corner, on a stone windowsill, was a basket, the kind that he and his father kept bran in at the stables. He walked across and looked into it, and a squalling, red-faced child looked back at him, fists clenched. The girl took the baby out and held it in the crook of her arm, glancing up at him.

“A fine lass,” he said at last.

“Aye,” the girl agreed. “When she quiets.”

As if in obedience, the hiccuping cry stopped, and the color
faded in the face, and all at once it was a tiny version of Harry Cavendish looking up at Jack—the same eyes, the same shape of forehead, the same color hair.

“Well, that’s his image,” Jack murmured.

“Aye, but best not say it,” the girl replied.

He looked for a while, turning the tobacco pouch over and over in his hands. “Did Mr. Gray come to see it?” he asked.

The girl made a huffing sound of disapproval. “She’s got a name.”

“Oh, aye?”

“It’s Cecilia,” the girl said, pronouncing it with elaborate care.

All was still. He could hear the water faintly lapping on the floor against the metal churns. “Cecilia,” he repeated.

“Reet fancy, though, bain’t it?” The girl leaned forward, imparting a secret. “It were the grandmother’s.”

“Whose grandmother’s?”

“Hers,” the girl replied, cocking her head in the direction of Rutherford. “
Her
mother’s.”

“Lady Cavendish?”

“Who else?” the girl said. “She comes here and pays us.”

“Eh? Does what?”

“Pays for her keep.”

“Does she indeed,” Jack murmured. “Does she.”

When he went back along the green lane, past the hedges, past the fields, he felt no surprise, though he had never known where the baby had gone until today. His father had said far away, but now he knew it was a lie to stop him from seeing Emily’s child, to stop him from thinking of that night, to stop him from thinking of Harry Cavendish. “Keep away,” his father had warned him. “Mind your work. That’s all you have to do. Don’t cross them.”

But
she
had not kept away.

She came to see her, and named her for her own mother.

She knew. And had, after all, kept her granddaughter close.

* * *

W
illiam reached the London house at six o’clock, to be met in the doorway by the de Rays and Louisa. There was a carriage standing outside—he presumed it belonged to Mrs. de Ray—and it was confirmed by the woman marching towards it, Florence and Louisa in tow, like some flounced and beribboned massive barge towing two smaller boats.

“Good evening,” he said.

Mrs. de Ray inclined her head by way of acknowledgment. Louisa caught his arm. “Where have you been?” she asked, all smiles. “We’re going out to the Chathams’ party. Mother says she’s not coming. Are you?”

“No,” he told her. “I’ve been to the House.”

“Oh, pooh,” Louisa retorted. She lowered her voice. “Florence’s mother seems in a bit of a bate.”

“Over what?”

“I’m sure I don’t know, Father,” Louisa said, gathering up her skirts. “There’s been a visitor in with Mother, and when Mrs. de Ray came they had some sort of confab and Mother said to go on without her. I haven’t been in there. I don’t know who it is.”

He regarded her levelly. “I do wish you wouldn’t use all this jargon—‘
confab’
indeed.”

She laughed and kissed his cheek. “You really won’t come?”

“Who is the visitor?” he asked.

“I told you that I don’t know,” she told him. “Mother kept the doors shut.”

He frowned. As Louisa got into the carriage he noticed Mrs. de Ray looking at him. It was a baleful glare, and the smile froze
on his face. It came to something to be snubbed on one’s own doorstep.

Inside, Bradfield stood waiting for him, taking his coat with downcast eyes.

“Where is Lady Cavendish?” he asked.

“In the drawing room, sir.”

“What the hell’s she doing in there?” he demanded. “Why isn’t she going out?”

Bradfield said nothing. As William made for the drawing room, the butler merely walked ahead and opened the door.

Octavia was sitting in a chair in the center of the room. He stood in the doorway, thinking immediately that she was ill; her face was deathly pale. She looked almost absent, and for an awful moment he thought of his own father in the moments after his fatal stroke, head cocked to one side as if listening to faint music before he died. Then Octavia turned her head and stared at him.

He stepped into the room, Bradfield closed the door, and it was only then that William noticed the figure standing at the far end of the room. It was a young man, hands clasped behind his back. He appeared, from his stance, as if he had been looking out the window through the heavy drapes at the carriage leaving outside.

“William,” Octavia said. Her voice was a low monotone. “I’m told that you know who this is. I’m told…” She hesitated. He saw that her eyes were full of tears.

The young man stepped forward. He bowed slightly from the waist. “Lord Cavendish,” he said, with a slightly satirical air. The lisp in his voice added a childish edge; William had an eerie sensation of having stepped onto a stage where the blackest comedy was taking place. He turned back to Octavia. “Dearest—” he began.

She held up her hand to stop him. “This,” she went on, “as you know, is Charles de Montfort.”

And then he realized, watching de Montfort walk towards him across the room, that Helene had carried out her threat. She had sent their son to London to see Octavia, to confront them both.

And that while he had been out that afternoon—sometime perhaps when he had been standing on the bridge idly watching the world go by—his marriage had fallen irretrievably to pieces.

O
n the day that John Boswell Gould was born, there had been an earthquake in New York City. It was August 10, 1884, and the noise rattled through Long Island and Connecticut and Pennsylvania, shaking the windows on Brighton Beach so much that the diners rushed out from the restaurants, and the telegraph officer on Coney Island asked where the explosion was, thinking that a powder mill had gone up. People in Greenpoint ran to the vast oil works, expecting to find an accident, and the animals in the Central Park menagerie paced their pens, disturbed, heads down, staring at the ground. Farther west, they said that the Housatonic River boiled and shook.

John was born at the split second of the second aftershock, in a Fifth Avenue mansion, right across the street from the Goulet brothers’ magnificent houses. Only four months before, John’s mother had been in there marveling at Mary Goulet’s gold drapes and the fourteenth-century-style dining room, but the scent of the flowers had made her feel doubly sick. She was sick all the time
while she was pregnant, she had told him. “And the stench of those damn flowers, those damn waterfalls and pastures and mountains and
roads
of damn flowers, John, I near passed out,” made her ill for the rest of her life at the sight of lilies.

And so he came into the world while Fifth Avenue cracked and rumbled, and while he grew up, New York grew up with him, just the same as him, leaping headlong, roaring down the world driven by the railroad and financier families that sweated the rest of the population. The streets got paved, the Astor slums flourished, and Little Italy heaved with doubling and redoubling torrents of immigrants. John Boswell Gould, in his fancy school suits, watched Waldorf build his giant hotel on the corner of Fifth and Thirty-third; then the Astoria right next door. John had watched the workmen crawling about in the scaffolding of the Gothic towers like flies on fanciful facades.

He had gone to Harvard with Mike Vanderbilt, and he knew Vincent Astor, and he had sailed at the yacht club where Jay Gould, his distant cousin who knew how many times removed, was reviled behind men’s hands and behind his own back, everywhere. “You a Gould?” he was asked. Sometimes they spit on the ground. “You a Fisk?” he’d reply. “You a Crocker?” They called them robber barons: the Fisks, the Vanderbilts, the Crockers, the Villards, the Harrimans, and they were all mad, in his opinion. Crazy mad like foxes, smashing banks and brotherhoods and businesses, and building up their vast fortunes—their hundred-million-dollar fortunes, their two-, three-, four-hundred-million-dollar fortunes. And their sons, some of them, went crazy too in their fathers’ footsteps, clinging on to slums or railroads or steel mills like weasels, or building casinos in the South of France, or getting divorced because they couldn’t satisfy their wives, or going crazy in quiet confused ways, unable to hold
a candle to the sledgehammer-wielding thugs who had been their fathers.

So he would say that he wasn’t really a Gould. He told himself that he was cut from a different cloth despite his money. He was second and third generation, and he had ideas of his own. His father, Oscar, had bought a department store—a good one too, a great one. It had all the New York ladies buying their linen there and their Tiffany glass and their inscribed dinner services and the trousseaux for their daughters. The waves of lace and silk and linens, and the floor after floor of furniture, had been enough to send John Boswell to Harvard, and let him spend his summers at the yacht club. It was where he had met J. Pierpont Morgan.

You could smell J. Pierpont coming a mile away by the trail of his Havana cigars, and God help you if you looked at him too long or tried to take his photograph, because the old man had some kind of illness that put a nose the size and shape of a bagel on his face. They had names for it—names they called it behind his back—but the real name was rhinophyma. It didn’t stop J. Pierpont from owning half the railroads in the country, though, or keeping all the banks in his pocket; and it didn’t stop him from being commodore of the club or having a big black steam yacht on which John Boswell had sailed; and it didn’t stop him from bellowing like a bull or being a force of nature, all of which John heartily admired. And John Pierpont Morgan, with his grotesque rhinophyma nose, was the real reason that he was here in England at all.

* * *

J
ohn Gould stood back now and surveyed Rutherford, the house seemingly silent and dozing in the early July afternoon sun. He had come to England before Christmas aboard the
Laconia
,
and, following his plan, he had seen other Tudor houses: Kentwell Hall and Long Melford and Burton Agnes. Yesterday he had been at Moulton Hall, the manor house built in 1650 and only a few miles up the road, near Richmond. The country around here reminded him of parts of Vermont; it was surely strange to think that the English places had already been old—ancient, their history indeterminate, the families who had once held them a thousand years ago now lost in time—when the
Mayflower
had nudged a shoreline on the other side of the Atlantic.

He had seen William Cavendish in London in March just before the Season began, and told him that he was writing a book, and asked whether he might visit Rutherford and look at the beautiful library. Cavendish, to his mind, had taken an age to reply, putting his head to one side and frowning, looking down at him as if from a great height. But then, John had found that was the way of the English. They distrusted a man if he didn’t own a title going back at least six centuries. Gould had a famous name, all right; they recognized that, and the word “Gould” had opened a good few doors to him that might otherwise have been closed. He had been admitted to numberless London drawing rooms, charming the ladies—those bored aristocratic ladies, how they blushed to be so ruthlessly charmed!—but the men…ah, the men were a different matter. They would ask him whether he rode, whether he shot, whether he hunted. They would ask what
manner
of trade his family was in, as if they were asking what
manner
of contagious illness he was carrying. And when he answered that he was just traveling, they frowned; if he dared to mention that he was writing a book, they shied away from him, as if the possession of a brain were a dangerous, incomprehensible treason. He had smiled to himself at it all. No doubt he was puzzling; he puzzled himself, in fact. He would agree with anyone who considered him feckless, for “feckless”
he rather liked; yes, feckless was good—he was feckless and footloose, impatient, easily bored; he had a curiosity in his soul that he couldn’t get the better of. It had led him all over: into houses, across seas. But he wanted to know people—yes, perhaps that was it most of all. He wanted to know people. And for a man it was, in any aristocratic household on this side of the great pond, seemingly like admitting to being a traveling freak show all his own.